Answer simple visual questions about your sick plants to identify pests, diseases, nutrient deficiencies, or chemical burns, with immediate step-by-step treatment solutions.
Are your leaves yellowing, fruit rotting, or holes appearing in your crop? Check what is harming your plants before wasting money on the wrong sprays or fertilizers.
Spraying insecticide on a fungal disease wastes money and does nothing to save the crop. Spraying fertilizer when roots are rotting can kill plants faster. This tool helps you pinpoint the exact cause and take the right action today.
Before buying expensive bottles of chemical spray, use this guide to accurately distinguish between insect attacks, microbial infections, nutrient deficiencies, and environmental stresses.
Look for: Clean ragged holes in leaves, missing leaf margins, sawdust-like droppings (frass), or bored holes in stalks and fruit.
Key Examples: Fall Armyworm, African Bollworm, Cutworms, Grasshoppers, Stalk borers.
First Response: Target the young caterpillar stage before they hide inside stems or cobs. Use biologicals (Bt) or selective insecticides.
Look for: Sticky clear honeydew on leaves, black sooty mold, curled leaf edges, silvery bleached leaves, or sudden leaf yellowing.
Key Examples: Aphids, Red Spider Mites, Thrips, Whiteflies, Leafhoppers.
First Response: Spray under leaves where sucking bugs hide. Use soapy water, neem oil, or translaminar/systemic sprays with a wetting agent.
Look for: Brown or black water-soaked spots, fuzzy powdery white/grey growth under leaves, concentric rings on spots, or rapid leaf death during wet humid weather.
Key Examples: Early Blight, Late Blight, Powdery Mildew, Rust, Anthracnose.
First Response: Stop overhead watering immediately. Spray preventative copper or mancozeb before rains, or curative systemic fungicides if already infected.
Look for: Sudden wilting while leaves are still green, foul smelling rotten stems or cabbage heads, V-shaped yellow wedges on leaf edges with black veins.
Key Examples: Bacterial Wilt, Black Rot, Soft Rot.
First Response: Remove and burn infected plants immediately. Do not work in wet fields. Rotate crops for at least 3 years away from that plant family.
Look for: Smooth colour changes across entire fields without rotting, chewed holes, or fungal mold. Older bottom leaves yellowing first (Nitrogen), purple leaf undersides (Phosphorus), or burnt leaf rims (Potassium).
First Response: Apply balanced basal fertilizer, top-dressing, or foliar feed. Check soil pH to prevent nutrient lockup.
Look for: Sudden twisted curling leaves (strap leaves) within 48 hours of spraying, bleached white burn spots on upper leaves facing the sun, or sharp boundary lines matching spray paths.
First Response: Wash foliage with clean water if recent. Apply amino acid / seaweed biostimulant tonics to help plants recover.
What it means: The mandatory number of days a farmer must wait between spraying a pesticide and harvesting the crop. Eating or selling food before the PHI expires leaves dangerous chemical poison inside the food which can poison consumers and cause market bans.
What it means: A chemical medicine that enters through the leaves or roots and travels through the plant sap to protect the entire plant from the inside. It cannot be washed off by rain once absorbed (usually 2-3 hours after spraying).
What it means: A chemical medicine that acts only on the surface where the spray droplet lands. It acts like an outer protective shield. If rain washes it off before it dries, its protection is lost.
What it means: The yellowing of green plant tissue caused by a loss of chlorophyll (the green food-making pigment). It can be caused by lack of nitrogen, poor drainage, or virus infection.
What it means: Dead, brown, dry, or black plant tissue that has completely collapsed.
What it means: A smart, money-saving farming method that combines good land hygiene, resistant seeds, companion plants, and hand-picking, and only uses chemical sprays as a last resort when pest numbers exceed economic loss thresholds.
What it means: The waste droppings left behind by insects and caterpillars. In maize funnels, it looks like wet sawdust.
What it means: An insect (like an aphid, whitefly, or leafhopper) that carries a plant virus from a sick plant and injects it into a healthy plant when feeding on sap.
This is almost always a sign of Nitrogen deficiency or natural plant aging. Nitrogen is a mobile nutrient, meaning the plant robs nitrogen from its older bottom leaves to feed new growing leaves at the top. If the yellowing starts in an inverted V-shape at the leaf tip, apply a nitrogen top-dressing (like Ammonium Nitrate or Urea) around the moist root zone.
Sudden wilting of green tomato plants usually indicates Bacterial Wilt (Ralstonia) or severe root drowning/rot. You can do the quick "Glass of Water Test": cut a 5cm piece of the lower stem and suspend it in a clean glass of clear water. If white milky threads stream down from the cut stem within 2-3 minutes, bacteria have clogged the stem pipelines. Infected plants must be dug up and burned.
Not all insects in your field are harmful! Ladybirds, praying mantises, hoverfly larvae, dragonflies, and parasitic wasps are natural friends that eat aphids and caterpillar eggs for free. Chewing caterpillars, leaf-mining grubs, stem borers, and thrips are pests. Never spray broad-spectrum cheap chemicals indiscriminately, as they kill your free natural predators and cause pest populations to explode afterwards.
Yes, but you must be careful about chemical compatibility. Always do a "Jar Test" first: mix small amounts in a clean 1-litre glass jar with water. If the mixture turns milky curd, forms thick jelly, gets hot, or settles into a hard precipitate, they are incompatible and must NEVER be mixed. Never mix copper fungicides with acidic foliar fertilizers or phosphorus sprays.